Sometimes done is better than perfect

doll clothes, pajama, pixie faire

My niece is at that age where I can make her happy with a new outfit for her doll, so that is exactly what she got for her birthday – new pjs and a quilt for her doll.

I started early with the best of intentions. I picked up a few half-yard cuts of flannel for the bottoms and a matching knit for the top and whipped up the pjs in one night. Then I tried them on and the shirt was WAY to tight. I didn’t sew anything wrong, I’ve just apparently completely left behind my 20-something sense of style and thought a little girl didn’t need an example of her doll wearing skin tight outfits.

The bonus is because I bought the pattern from Pixie Faire as a downloadable PDF, I was able to print the pattern out at 115 percent of the original size and problem solved.

doll quilt

But having to remake the the shirt put me behind and the day it was time to give her the present, I hadn’t even started quilting the doll quilt. The free motion quilting was no big deal. But I didn’t have time to bind it all by hand.

machine binding

So while I generally hate the look of machine binding, I figured for a doll quilt that would be played with, left on the floor and generally abused, machine binding would do just fine. To sew the binding down by machine, first I turned it to the back of the quilt and pinned the binding in place about every six inches, with two pins in the corners to form the mitered border.

machine binding

Then I flipped the quilt over and stitched in the ditch formed by the seam of the quilt to the binding edge. It wasn’t perfect, but it was done. And that was what mattered.

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Comment (3)

  1. That’s pretty much my attitude 90% of the time. =) The pjs and the quiltlet are adorable and she won’t be critical!

  2. You could use Sharon Schamber’s glue trick and it will be perfect every time. If you are not familiar with her, she is a nationally know quilter and wins big prizes for her quilts. I use this method with all my donation quilts that are usually ‘well loved’ so don’t sew the binding down by hand on them. The tiny amount used can’t even be felt. As she says, the elmer’s washable school glue is a starch product that completely washes out.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2hWQ5-ZccE

    Karol

  3. I started machine binding on all my quilts just lately. I use the “fagoting” embroidery stitch and it is beautiful. The binding is first sewn on the back of the quilt straight stitching. Then it is folded to the front of the quilt. I position the right fold of the binding in line with the extreme right edge of the foot. I then embroider stitch all around including the mitered corners and it is perfect on both sides. I love it very much and it only takes 3 hours to completely do a queen sized quilt. I used to spend days hand stitching these bindings for a quilt.

    Marilyn Robichaud

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